Publication: London Sunday Times [UK]
Date: June 5, 1994
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Title: "Purple Pain?"
Interviewed By: Robert Sandall

He's a marketing nightmare: prolific,prodigious and unpronounceable.Robert Sandall on why a leading label is finding its small one rather a big problem.

His name used to bePrince,and he is angry or if not angry, mightily frustrated. ''Rock and roll was so much better when people were hungry,'' he told a journalist from Q magazine in a recent almost- interview(no tapes, notepads or questions allowed). ''It was better when you didn't automatically make money. When James Brown was putting out an album every four months, that was the stuff... That's just the sort of thing I can't do.''

After a year of typically intense and, in some eyes, inconveniently prolific activity, relations between the artist formerly known as (fka)Princeand his record company have reached an all-time low. The dispute centres on the age-old conflict between creativity and commerce, between fkaPrince'sdesire to release substantial quantities of new material as and when he wants, which might be several times a year, and the view over at Warners' head office in Burbank, California, that he is thereby in serious danger of flooding the market. The record company, like any other label with a heavyweight roster, favours a three-year product cycle, long enough to convert a hit album into a blockbuster: fkaPrince,however, is far more interested in getting his music heard than in ratcheting up its sales.

His decision, on his 35th birthday last June, to drop plain old '' Prince' ' for a peculiar and inarticulable hieroglyph, partly made up of the male and female gender symbols, has started to look like an elaborate gesture of contempt for the brand marketing of his own celebrity. ''He now feels completely cornered by Warners,'' a close business associate said last week.''And he's looking to make contact with people outside the record company who can help him achieve what he wants.''

Small wonder, then, that in his first lengthy heart-to-heart with the media in more than 10 years, the star who cannot, or will not, speak his name kept mentioning George Michael's legal battle to free himself from his contract with Sony. Nobody is suggesting that Warners might be about to receive a hostile letter from fkaPrince'slawyers, but the disclosure that this notoriously uncommunicative artist talks regularly on the phone to Michael whom he has never met, but apparently supports does seem significant. The further fact that he now openly refers to himself as ''an artist without a contract'' can hardly be comforting news for the company which, in 1992, signed an agreement promising him $60m-$100m in exchange for six more albums.

On the face of it, 1994 has been a good year for the small but perfectly formed purple hieroglyph. His recent cooingly schmaltzy single, The Most Beautiful Girl In The World, earned him his first number-one hit in the UK, and did equally well across the rest of Europe. Despite its superfluous feel and rather steep price of Pounds 9.99, an EP, The Beautiful Experience, featuring different arrangements and recordings of the same track, has just made the top 20. In April, he opened a shop in north London to match the one in his home town, Minneapolis where trade in fka Princely memorabilia has been brisk. Having been extensively partied and feted by a realprince,Albert of Monaco, at the World Music Awards in Monte Carlo last month, his position in the premier division of popstardom looks as secure as ever, and ordinary business appears to be continuing as usual: a new album, Come, is slated for release in July, to be followed by a European tour.

The subtext to this success story is a good deal less cheerful. Early this year, fkaPrince'sown ''boutique'' label, Paisley Park, a subsidiary of Warners jointly owned by the artist and the multinational parent company, was wound up. Behind all the talk about a mutually agreed decision lay a history of mutual resentments. During its eight-year existence, Paisley Park had put out dozens of albums, most of them byPrince'sproteges or musical heroes.

Despite plenty of media attention, and a regular flow of million-sellers from the label's flagship star and co-owner, none of the ancillary releases ever troubled chart compilers anywhere. No proper promotional support from Warners was the complaint at Paisley Park's HQ; back in Burbank, meanwhile, the prevailing view was that superstars don't necessarily make the best talent scouts. The breakdown in trust became so severe that by the time Paisley Park issued new albums by the gospel veteran Mavis Staples and the cartoon funk guru George Clinton at the end of 1993, Warners' interest had pretty much evaporated. The Staples record wasn't even released outside America, and despite Clinton's renaissance as a figurehead of the 1970s revival, his excellent Hey Man... Smell My Finger sank as swiftly as every other non-Princely Paisley Park product had done.

With fkaPrince'slabel finally counted out, the number crunchers at Warners were in no mood to countenence what they saw as another of his surefire money-losers, a new song he loved and wanted to release as a single, called The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. The problem here, according to record business wisdom, was that singles, even hit singles, can only show a profit if they act as trailers for albums. With a newPrincealbum four months away, and this song not on it, Warners was, understandably perhaps, not prepared to mobilise its vast and costly promotional machine on behalf of the single; instead, the company allowed him to release it on his own NPG label a successor to Paisley Park in which Warners has no financial stake and no marketing obligations. Distributed through an international network of independents (including, in the UK, a two-man company called Grapevine), the single has sold more than enough to cover its modest overheads; and with the spin-off EP also doing well, fka Princemust now be pondering his relationship with the big label that could not, or would not, release it.

He has been here, or hereabouts, before. Ever since the mysterious suppression of the notorious Black Album in 1988, the then and now former Prince'sprodigious output has caused corporate execs to hop about with alarm. To a record company that likes to ''work'' an album releasing half of it in carefully staggered single packages, arranging movie tie-ins and a supporting global tour such unbridled fecundity is a nightmare. In the spring of 1989 a panicked bigwig from Warners flew to Minneapolis to plead with him not to release Graffiti Bridge so soon after 1988's 5m-selling Batman.Prince,whose albums have appeared like clockwork every summer since the Purple Rain breakthrough in 1984, refused. A similar row occurred after the American success of theDiamonds And Pearlsalbum in 1991: a coast-to-coast American tour, Warners reasoned, would putPrinceback up there with Madonna and Jackson. Again, he declined, preferring to take a quick trip to Europe before returning to the studio.

Though he enjoys the trappings of fame, he prefers the company of his muse. While other superstar songwriters such as George Michael or Michael Jackson seem stretched to produce a dozen numbers every two years and complete albums at a rate of about two per decade, fkaPrinceturns them out on a daily basis, almost in the manner of a bodily function. ''I can't really sleep,'' he said last week. ''As soon as I lie down, a song comes into my head.'' He has never taken a holiday, has no family commitments and will spend whole nights after shows jamming ideas with pick-up bands on small club stages or in recording studios. Estimates as to the number of completed, unheard tracks lying in tape cans at his Paisley Park complex vary between 300 and 500.

Unofficial ''bootleg'' albums run into the hundreds, too, the most famous of which, The Crown Jewels, contains an hour of unreleased studio recordings. Hyperproductivity at the expense of commercial expediency is clearly a principle which the nameless one intends to pursue in the run-up to the summer release of his next Warners album, Come. This Tuesday, on his 36th birthday, he is issuing a CD-ROM, titled Interactive, with another small independent company, Graphix Zone. Retailing at Pounds 39.99 through HMV, this computerised audio-visual package contains new tracks and old, and includes a fantasy trip round his home studio, as well as a karaoke setting of the Princely classic, Kiss. Among other projects waiting in the wings are an opera, a blues album and a plan for an album that can be given away, ''for free, like air''. Warners, one can foresee, might have a problem with this.''My problem,'' he said, ''is getting things out before another idea comes along.''